Water and food in Africa

While doing my research about water management and agriculture, I found the TedTalk linked below about the “hidden costs” of our food consumption, increasing my interest about the  virtual water (VW) thematic. This concept, first mentioned by J.A. Allan in 1996, aims to indicate the " conceptual volume of water needed to produce commodities traded to an  importing  country" ( Hanasaki, 2009 ). This term became very popular within the water managem ent literature and was also mentioned by some medias quite early on, with for example the National Geographic publishing a supplement intitled "Hidden Water" in April 2010 . In addition to this, different “kinds” of water can be differentiated when talking about the different elements contributing to the food chain production. For example, with livestock, blue water is used to directly water animals, green water to irrigate the plants then used to feed the betail, and finally grey water, used for the sanitation, cleanin...

While more than half of Africa’s population already lives in an urban environment (especially small and medium cities), and the number of urban residents expected to rise up to 20.2% in 2050 ( CSIS, 2018 ), agriculture still remains an important source of employment  and could be a place of innovation for the environmental and demographical issues that most of these areas are facing. If the variety of climates, soils, cultures and economies cannot allow us to generalize our reflexions to the entire continent, we can however underline the importance of the water management in urban and peri-urban areas, as the line defining urban and rural is becoming blurrier, and urban agriculture is becoming increasingly important for the food autonomy and development of a lot of cities ( H. De Bon et al., 2010 ). This tendency induces conflicts around water distribution, pollution, sanitation and between local agriculture and food importation. While the density of the cities imposes important qu...

               After reading the article “ How to Write About Africa ”, by Binyavanga Wainaina, I started asking myself what my perception about food and water in Africa was, and what was expected from me to think as a white women, according to the mainstream sources of information. When I looked on Google Image, the first pictures that appear were totally matching with Wainaina’s description of the white gaze over Africa: “In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving.”; “Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty”. Even though I know that the management of water and food is not as caricatural, I yet realized that I remain rel...